Profiles – Women in Business & Rising Stars · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · Global Issue · June 2026

Climate change in Botswana is not a distant scenario; it is a supply problem with a calendar. Heat, drought and water stress press on food and energy at the same time. That pressure is also an opening, and the energy and mineral exploration deals signed with Oman sit alongside a wider renewables push that is creating space for a new kind of founder – the climate entrepreneur building businesses around the country's environmental constraints.

Many are women entering a field that did not exist as a category a few years ago, turning solar potential, water scarcity and food insecurity into products and services Botswana actually needs. They are not waiting for the climate problem to be solved at the policy level; they are building the answers a business at a time.

Renewables: from policy to enterprise

A national lean toward renewables and energy partnerships does more than add generating capacity. It creates demand for installation, maintenance, financing and the small enterprises that surround a clean-energy build-out. For a sun-rich country, the opportunity is concrete: the entrepreneur who can deliver and service solar capacity is building on a resource Botswana has in abundance.

That abundance matters for an economy that imports a large share of its electricity. Every megawatt generated at home is a megawatt less exposed to a neighbour's shortfall or price. The climate entrepreneur working in renewables is therefore building energy security as a by-product of building a business.

In a country this sunlit, renewable energy is less an import than a harvest.

Food security as a market, not just a worry

Food-security shocks are a threat, but they also signal demand for solutions – water-efficient agriculture, resilient supply chains, local production that reduces exposure to imported food prices. Climate entrepreneurs who treat these shocks as a market read them correctly: the need is rising, and it is not going away with the next good rainy season.

For a country that imports much of its food, the firm that can produce more locally and more efficiently is selling resilience as much as produce. Drought makes the value of that resilience plain, and each shock teaches buyers – households, retailers, government – to pay for it rather than gamble on the weather.

Every food-security shock is also a standing order for the firm that can answer it.

The founder at the intersection

The strongest climate businesses sit where energy, water and food meet – because that intersection is exactly where Botswana's vulnerability is sharpest. Building there is harder and slower than chasing a single product, but it is also where a durable enterprise, and a measure of national resilience, can be built at the same time.

Resilience and opportunity share the same address in a warming economy.

Patient capital for a patient problem

Climate businesses tend to ask for patience that ordinary finance is reluctant to give. A solar installation, a water-efficient farm or a resilient supply chain often pays back slowly and steadily rather than quickly and spectacularly. That mismatch is one reason the sector has been slow to fill, and it is where development finance, CEDA-style support and informed lenders can make the difference between a good idea and a going concern.

The climate entrepreneurs who succeed tend to be fluent in this funding landscape as well as in their technology. They know how to frame a slow, durable return for the kind of capital willing to wait for it. In a country exposed to drought and energy stress, building that financing bridge is as much a part of the work as the engineering.

A slow-paying solution still needs someone patient enough to fund it.

For Botswana, the climate entrepreneur represents diversification with a double return – new businesses and reduced exposure to the shocks that threaten food and energy. The space is opening now, shaped by renewables momentum and the hard arithmetic of scarcity. The founders who move into it are not just chasing a market; they are helping a dry country secure its own footing. In an environment where heat and drought set the terms, the climate entrepreneur is one of the few operators whose commercial success and the country's resilience point in exactly the same direction.

Sources: Reuters